


bravery and violets

by themorninglark



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Azure Moon Route, Canon Compliant, M/M, some canon compliant descriptions of war/violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:40:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23262598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/pseuds/themorninglark
Summary: Standing before him like this, sword pointing straight at Ashe’s collarbone with only a lonely flickering flame to light his face, Yuri cuts a dashing figure straight out of a wild legend. He has grown out of shadows. Ashe will tell him as much, years later, when Yuri says he has never come out of the dark.In which Ashe reunites with an old friend, over and over anew as the world changes.
Relationships: Ashe Duran | Ashe Ubert/Yuris Leclair | Yuri Leclerc
Comments: 21
Kudos: 127





	bravery and violets

**Author's Note:**

> Cindered Shadows, Chapter 1: Yuri and Ashe are childhood friends—  
> me: say no more

When Yuri locks gazes with him over the point of a blade and says, _I know you_ , Ashe doesn’t get what he means at first. He thinks Yuri must mean it some other way, like he has taken the measure of Ashe in a single glance and passed his judgement, and how can he think any different with Yuri’s eyes boring into him like that, how can it be possible for someone to look at another person like that? Lavender never seemed so unforgiving. _I know you._ Ashe steels his grip round his bow, swallows and refuses to blink, and then Yuri says the name _Lord Lonato_ and all at once it rushes back. Count Rowe’s boy. _Yuri._

As fate would have it, they've both grown up slight. Yuri, like Ashe, is short for his age; unlike Ashe, he’s gone for the sword as his weapon of choice. He’d always been handy with a knife. Ashe, sitting on the kitchen doorstep beside Yuri, watching him peel an apple clean in one smooth, continuous motion. He had been wide-eyed with wonder then. Less so, now, but looking at Yuri in this moment, all Ashe can think about is home, home. How Yuri’s family must miss him so terribly, as Ashe had missed him when he left.

Standing before him like this, sword pointing straight at Ashe’s collarbone with only a lonely flickering flame to light his face, Yuri cuts a dashing figure straight out of a wild legend. He has grown out of shadows. Ashe will tell him as much, years later, when Yuri says he has never come out of the dark.

* * *

This is how Yuri tells it to Ashe.

They’re on their knees on a dirty floor, side by side, elbow deep in the scrap heap of Abyss. The other day, Yuri had seen a silver bow with a snapped string in there that would be perfectly usable if only someone fixed it up, but it’s been buried now under a pile of tarnished plates, chipped teacups and pots with the bottoms burned out of them. To Yuri’s credit, he doesn’t try and clear the sharp things away so Ashe won’t get hurt while they rummage for it. They both get their fair share of nicks and scratches.

It was Christophe’s birthday, says Yuri, and Count Rowe had brought Yuri along. He was too young then to understand what it meant to drink wine, but he’d always been nothing if not a quick study and he knew that this was what the grown-ups did, stand around with goblets in their hands looking like they belonged and they knew it. So Yuri did that, found a spot by the velvet curtains where he could scan the entire room, and that was when he saw him. A boy like him. A boy not born to be here.

Yuri had never seen Ashe on the streets before. They had grown up in different alleyways. But that didn’t matter: he knew the way Ashe stood off to one side, watching everyone. The way he took the buns from the pastry table, cautiously at first before growing bolder, as if torn between the wonder of having all this food available to him, and the desire to scarf it down all at once in case it vanished. Eating with crumbs around his mouth that he never once thought to wipe off. They didn’t have time for that sort of thing. Perhaps there was one boy here Yuri could be friends with, after all, amongst all these nobles.

And Ashe saw Yuri, crossed the room and took his hand and smiled and said, let me show you the library. His fingers were still sticky with berry juice. Yuri would remember how he wiped them before touching any of the books. How nimbly he climbed the ladder up to the top shelf, like he couldn’t wait to get there, like there was a treasure there he had been bursting to share with someone for the longest time.

* * *

Yuri Leclerc has asked to rejoin his old class, several years late. So the whisper goes around the corridors of Garreg Mach, and with it, the idea of Yuri himself. He was expelled for theft, for stealing from the church, for stealing from Archbishop Rhea no less; he had poisoned a man, he had run away and formed his own crime ring in Abyss, he had killed soldiers, he had killed Knights of Seiros. Each story is more outrageous than the next.

He is already there when Ashe comes to class on the second Monday of the Harpstring Moon. The professor is writing up today’s lesson outline on the chalkboard, and Yuri is casually slouching in his chair at a table that isn’t near the front nor the back, where it’s easy to lean to one side and be half-hidden behind a pillar.

He looks up as Ashe makes his way to his usual desk in the second row. The ghost of a smile plays about his lips. _Yuri_ , Ashe starts to say, but then the bell goes and everyone else is filing in and by the time class ends, Yuri’s gone before Ashe even turns around to look at him again.

What would he have said, had the bell not gone? Ashe turns it over in his head all week. At the market, the archery range, the dining hall, where Ashe eats with Mercedes and Annette while Yuri eats, at odd hours, with his friends from Abyss. Yuri laughs at all of Balthus’s off-colour jokes, lets Hapi fall asleep and nap at the table for as long as she likes, and tucks into sweets with the same unfettered delight he used to when they charmed the cook into sneaking them a taster of dessert. _Yuri, hi. Yuri, I’m glad you’re safe. Yuri, do you remember—_

Ashe never says any of this. It’s Yuri who surprises him first, outside the sauna of all places. Ashe steps out after a particularly warm session, pink in the face and towel over his shoulders, to see, first, the gleam of a swordpoint against the open sky, and then Yuri leaning beside the door, sharpening his blade.

“You keep watching me,” he says. It’s not a question.

Ashe looks down at his feet. The seams between these flagstones are maddeningly solid, in spite of how very old they are. They will not open up and swallow him whole. He could stand very still and say nothing. He’s good at that, at being quiet when he needs to be, but Yuri is just as good at noticing what doesn’t want to be noticed.

“You don’t have to pretend we don’t know each other, you know,” Yuri adds.

“I’m not doing that,” says Ashe, head snapping up.

“Oh? Then are you ashamed your old friend is now a crime lord? I wouldn’t blame you.”

“No!” Ashe blurts out, then pauses, takes a breath. It comes shallow and hasty. He’s gripping the ends of his towel now, the cotton rough against the back of his neck. A cool wind rises to rustle the leaves of the tree overhead.

“I couldn’t be ashamed of you, Yuri. I’m sorry, if that’s what you think. I just…“

Yuri lowers his arm to tuck the whetstone away in a pouch by his belt, and hums in satisfaction as he gives his sword a little swing. That little swish and flick catches at Ashe’s throat, cuts off his next words with all the grace of an old muscle memory. He has seen that motion a hundred times, and most of all, he has heard that hum. The littlest things used to please Yuri so much. Finding an exciting combination of spices when they helped out in the kitchen. Sneaking up successfully on a cat in the garden. Making a sturdy weapon out of a fallen branch, whittling a point from it without getting a single splinter.

“I guess I didn’t know if we were still friends,” says Ashe, at last. It sounds lame, even to him. “You’re different now.”

Yuri laughs. The mockingbird, they call him. The savage mockingbird. It seems unreal to Ashe. The Yuri he knew could never be savage. The Yuri he knew was kind and gentle and generous. He would sit next to him and listen as Ashe read from his favourite books. He never made fun of him for wanting to become a knight one day.

This Yuri looks back at him with an appraising gaze and two arms’ lengths between them. Ashe presses his towel to his face. It’s still warm. He is probably still pink, maybe even pinker than he was when he walked out of the sauna two minutes ago. But then Yuri puts his sword away, and when he speaks again, his voice is soft. “So are you.”

Ashe stares. He doesn’t realise he’s gaping until he pulls himself together to say something. “Am I?”

Yuri smiles. He doesn’t elaborate, merely nods at Ashe and walks away.

* * *

Later, Ashe will look at himself in the mirror of his bedroom and think: he is the same. Everything about him is the same, and how it frustrates him sometimes. Still the small skinny kid who scaled the ivy outside Castle Gaspard and crawled headfirst into the window of the library. Still reaching, still dreaming. He cannot imagine what Yuri means. But Yuri is not the sort of boy to say things he does not mean, and so Ashe looks, and looks, until he has stared so long his own freckles start to blur and look unfamiliar.

In the weeks to come, Ashe will notice a handful of things about Yuri. He has the skill for fishing, but doesn’t like sitting still for that long. He ties his hair up when he spars with Felix. He has several sets of dice on him at any moment in time, but only one pair is loaded, and he only uses them when he has a point to prove. His handwriting is neat and his letters slant left. He’s always early. The one time Ashe thinks he’s beaten Yuri to class, he is soundly disabused of the notion not thirty seconds later when Yuri emerges from a corner, notebook in hand.

Ashe nearly drops his satchel on his own feet. “Were you standing there all this time?”

“Depends on what you mean by _all this time_ ,” Yuri says, strolling over to the front of the room. He spins his pencil idly round his fingers. It’s getting worn down, a little nub of a thing barely long enough to twirl. Ashe blinks, and then it’s gone, slipped up a sleeve or into a pocket somewhere, and Yuri has walked up to Ashe and made a perch of the edge of his desk. A whiff of something makes Ashe pause midway through taking out his books.

“You smell sweet,” he says.

Yuri raises his eyebrows, saying nothing for a long, drawn-out moment. Ashe offers up a silent prayer of desperation to the goddess, for his complexion and his freckles and the flush that’s flaring up round his neck right now. “I mean—”

“Want one?” Yuri asks, reaching into his pocket. He pulls out two sticky buns, and holds one out to Ashe.

Ashe stares. “You’ve been in the kitchens!”

“Aren’t you smart. Want one? I know how you love Noa fruit.”

“How did you get those?”

“I showed up and made enough of a nuisance of myself that when I asked very nicely, Cook was fed up enough to give them to me. Or maybe I swiped them. What do you think?”

Yuri’s tone is light as he leans over and presses a bun into Ashe’s hand. There’s a smattering of flour on his fingertips that leaves a white smudge on Ashe’s palm. He hops off the desk before Ashe can answer, humming while he walks back to his own seat. Ashe stares down at the bun. Cook would certainly have given them to Yuri, if he asked very nicely. Ashe has seen him do as much in kitchens all up and down the Faerghus border. He has also seen him step in to stir a stew that’s about to stick to the pot, or take over beating eggs for the baker's assistant. Yuri does these things without being asked. He is good at them. He disappears before anyone can thank him, although it seems, this time, he hasn’t been able to leave without repayment in the form of baked goods.

* * *

There’s been an empty spot next to Ashe in the choir for as long as Yuri’s been enrolled at Garreg Mach. Ashe only sings tenor because his voice pitches high. There is nothing more to it. For the longest time, he has wished he could join Dimitri in the baritone section, but Dimitri in his disarmingly frank way tells Ashe it is a fate he would wish on no one, to be standing by his side in choir practice. The poor individual would suffer throughout the hymn. They would surely be deafened and thrown off tune by Dimitri’s lack of any musical sense whatsoever.

Ashe only sings tenor because he can’t sing anything else, but Yuri, Yuri sings tenor because he sounds beautiful singing it. The frustrating thing is that no one else knows this. Even Professor Manuela does not know this. Yuri hasn’t shown up for a single choir practice the whole term.

Ashe doesn’t mean to corner Yuri, but it ends up looking that way when he sees Yuri outside the cathedral one day with a handful of flowers, and catches him by the wrist without thinking.

“Why do you keep skipping choir practice?”

Yuri’s lip curls. He’s silent for a moment. Ashe feels him stiffen in his grasp, ever so slightly; the flower petals are trembling, against the wind. Now, Yuri’s now shifting his weight evenly on both feet like he’s about to draw his blade, now he’s looking Ashe straight in the eye like he’s doing him a favour by answering. “Because I don’t sing for others.”

Ashe takes a step closer to Yuri, his voice raised. “That’s not true! I’ve seen you. You sing so well.”

“Well, Ashe, you pick locks so well,” says Yuri lightly. “Why don’t you go around picking locks all the time? Just because I’m good at something, does that mean I have to do it?”

Ashe’s biting down on the inside of his mouth before he realises it. All this while, Yuri hasn’t bothered trying to shake his hand loose, or stepping back. That half-smile’s still on his face as Ashe’s fingers close tight round his wrist. He is not frail. He is anything but frail. Ashe couldn’t break him if he tried. Goddess knows, the very last thing he wants to do right then is break Yuri, and if Yuri thinks Ashe will break so easily against their shared ruins, he is sorely mistaken.

“I’m not ashamed of my past,” he says. “Dimitri, the professor, everyone knows what I am. I’m not trying to run away from anything.”

Yuri smiles. “Are you suggesting I am?”

“No! I’m not—I’m not _suggesting_ anything about you. I just want to…”

 _To sing with you?_ That’s only half true. The truth is, Ashe just wants to hear Yuri sing, and that is selfish. It is selfish of him. Who does he think he is? Who is he, to Yuri, to demand such a thing?

His fingers uncurl all at once. His arm falls limply to his side. The hymnal in his satchel weighs heavy. His shoulder aches. “I’m sorry, Yuri. I overstepped. Please, forgive me.”

Yuri stares at him, then shakes his head, rubbing the inside of his wrist. “There’s nothing to forgive.”

They stand in silence for a moment, then Yuri gestures at the flowers in his hand. “I just got these from the greenhouse keeper. I thought the innkeeper in Abyss might appreciate them as decor. Would you like to come with me?”

Ashe nods, and they go.

* * *

Whether they become friends after that, or they had been friends all along and it had taken this much, lilies and hymns and voices like bowstrings stretched taut to snapping, Ashe doesn’t know. What he does know is that on the night of the ball, Yuri is there and for all his immaculate grace in so many other situations, he is a far worse dancer than Ashe and so he lets Ashe lead, until Ashe is dizzy from twirling, until Yuri’s head is bent upon his shoulder and and the music’s still playing and Ashe thinks he hears, laced through the notes of this waltz, Yuri’s voice by his ear.

There is that one time Yuri is on horse-grooming duty and Ashe, off the chore roster for the week, is jolted from his repose under a tree by the sudden gallop of hooves, a streak of grey-white flanks and the rare sound of Yuri’s footsteps approaching. Yuri is not heard unless he wants to be.

“Ashe, help me,” he calls as he sprints past, and Ashe leaves his book in the grass, springs to his feet and takes off after Yuri and his runaway charge. It’s a glorious day, the sky is a sweet robin’s egg blue and Ashe can’t help smiling as Yuri runs ahead so very fleet of foot, as he races to catch up, as the field opens up before them. By the time they’ve tired the horse and themselves out, Ashe feels so light he could rise up on the wind whipping wild and free in their faces, through the vastness of this sacred land. He presses a hand to the horse’s neck, strokes its mane and murmurs _hey, hey, it’s okay_ in a low voice, as Yuri bends over winded.

“I don’t know why I get put on this duty ever,” Yuri grumbles. “It’s not like I’m ever going to belong on a horse. I’m not made for horses.”

Ashe takes the reins. They walk back together, the horse now trotting sedately at their heels. “Neither am I.”

Yuri laughs. “You sure about that? The professor’s training you to become a bow knight, you know. Like you always dreamed of.”

The wild reeds are growing tall by the moat. This far out on the monastery grounds, the dandelions cover the fields in full bloom. There will be spinny white spores on their boots when they get back. This, all of this down to the last blade of grass is what Ashe will protect, once he is a knight.

“While I’ll still be in the gutter,” Yuri adds. “Cleaning the rats out.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Ashe says, and the fierceness in his voice startles even himself. With his free hand, he reaches to take Yuri’s. They’re both covered in sweat, still flushed from running their hearts out, and that must be why his pulse is racing like this, thinks Ashe, that must be why, because he is so calm right now as he pulls Yuri closer, as he speaks and his words peal clear as a bell between them.

“You’ll be with me,” he says. Yuri’s lips part, let out a soft breath. Ashe leans in to catch it.

* * *

But then five years pass when they are not together, and the last Ashe sees of Yuri is his shadow slipping behind a crumbling wall, clutching his sword arm like his elbow’s broken, bent funny. Ashe starts to run after him but Balthus beats him to it, and then there’s an Imperial soldier shooting at him from the trees and Ashe has to duck and fight back, fight back like he’s never fought before.

He can’t go back to Lord Lonato’s. With a start, Ashe realises it’s been a long time since he thought of Castle Gaspard as _home_. Garreg Mach is the place that comes to mind now, when he thinks of home, but he cannot stay and that is how his feet bring him to House Rowe, one year after the monastery falls. He knows the lay of the land. He can be useful here.

Yuri is nowhere to be seen, but that knight, the one who used to keep an eye on Yuri, is. The Gray Lion, Gwendal. The years have aged him, added more scars to his face, but his eyes are as kind as Ashe remembers. Once, they were in the greenhouse and Ashe was teaching Yuri everything he learned from his gardener about healing herbs, and Gwendal had come to get him, looked Ashe up and down before gravely thanking him for keeping young master Yuri company. This was a real knight, thought Ashe, staring up at him in open awe.

So often, he burns inside to tell Lord Gwendal that Yuri is safe. Surely, if anyone would be safe, it would be Yuri. It might soften that permanent crease in between Gwendal’s eyebrows, if he knew what Yuri had made of himself in the years since he left.

But when Cornelia’s betrayal reaches the border and House Rowe promptly declares their new fealty, Ashe doesn’t waste any time leaving. The royal blue banners throughout the castle are still being ripped down when he takes what little he has, visits the stables one last time, picks the lock of the back gate and walks out with his bow in his hand. He is luckier than most. He can live on the streets for a long time. He’s never forgotten how, and perhaps that’s as good a home to return to as any when he needs to lie low.

How much of a reunion it will be without Dimitri, Ashe cannot imagine. But he will go; it has been the one unwavering beacon in his life the past five years, the North Star he has looked to every night. He would not know how to walk away even if he wished to. His winding path draws him inexorably towards the ruin that is Garreg Mach, and then it’s all smashed wide open and put back together again, piece by painful piece, when he runs into Gilbert on the way, when he dashes into the midst of a battle to see a blood-soaked blue cloak and the mighty point of a lance flashing bright and bloody, broken stones and bodies all around them.

Dimitri is alive. The professor is alive. Everyone, everyone, against all odds, still draws breath. Ashe’s bow is singing to the dawn. He is not thinking any more, only nocking arrow after arrow and letting fly like he never has before. There is just enough light to see by. He has got by with so much less.

And as day breaks over the battered walls, Ashe stands on the battlements and looks out upon what remains, and there he is sweeping in not a second too late, a violet zephyr that still takes his breath away.

He takes a deep breath and opens his mouth, calls, _Yuri, Yuri._

Yuri’s head whips up. Ashe lifts his bow. Against the rising sun, Yuri’s smile is more brilliant still than the sword he raises in reply.

* * *

Dimitri is injured after they retake the monastery, and Mercedes is simmering with anger, and Ashe cannot say which sight fills him with more fear. He is thoughtless, says Mercedes in clipped tones, as she moves from cot to cot, stanching blood where even her magic is not enough, making tourniquets out of torn-up tunics and fallen branches. He fights like he wants nothing more than to throw his own life away, and she will not stand for it. They have not been through this much to get him back just to lose him again so soon.

How heart-rending, how fractious the balance of a life can be. How many lives hang by a thread now, so snarled and tangled Ashe dares not speak of it. Mercedes, as usual, is right. There are no lives more fragile than those who seem determined to run themselves to the ground. Yuri is spent. He has been helping in their makeshift infirmary as best as he can, but his greater skill is in the sword, not white magic. There are dark circles under his eyes and blood drying on one cheek.

Ashe goes to him where he’s kneeling beside a soldier on a blanket, and lays a hand on his shoulder. “Cook with me, Yuri.”

Yuri stares up at him, almost right through him. “Ashe. I’m busy.”

Ashe shakes his head. “You’ll collapse if you go on like this. You’ll be of no use to anyone. I need your help.”

No sympathy, no smiles. Ashe’s grip tightens on Yuri’s shoulder. He needs Yuri’s help, but more than that he needs Yuri, and he needs him alive right now.

Without saying a word, Yuri stands up slowly and follows Ashe to the campfire, where he’s spread out what he’s managed to salvage from the kitchen’s storehouse. No one has tilled the fields here for far too long. Forget sweet buns and freshly-caught fish, there aren’t even potatoes and carrots, but they do have dried beans and jerky and herbs, and some pickles in jars that they can’t afford to be fussy about.

“Get the water boiling,” says Ashe. “Then pick through those herbs. Toss whatever you think will go well with beans into the pot.”

He picks up a knife, starts to make clean little incisions in the jerky. Later, they will season it with rosemary and thyme, and he and Yuri will serve the first meal of their reunion in a dusty dining hall, and watching Ingrid tuck in with gusto will make them all smile again.

Yuri does not hum as they work side by side. But in the silence, Ashe can hear his ragged breathing start to slow, to calm down. This, too, has to be enough.

* * *

It’s not like Yuri goes anywhere near Gwendal, after he runs his sword through him. No hanging about, no taking a moment to cast one last glance back at the knight’s body. He sheathes his sword and walks away. Everything about him is speaking the language of grief. _You were the only one who treated me as an equal._ How deceptively even he had sounded, in that moment, as he stood with his shoulders tight, his blade steady. Now, as he pauses on the edge of a lava pool bubbling hot and furious at his feet, he is so still the landscape looks like it is swallowing him alive. The heat in Ailell is swallowing him alive.

“Should we go to him?” asks Annette, starting forward. Ashe shakes his head, and puts a hand out to hold her back.

Later, when they are slowly regrouping, tending to the wounded and scouring the battlefield for what supplies they can scavenge, Yuri comes to stand next to Ashe, who is midway through restringing his bow. Yuri has not cried. His eyes are not red. He is wearing his grief like an tattoo on his bloodied sleeve, on the rawness of his voice, on how very tired he sounds with every word he speaks.

“I guess this must be how you felt. All those years ago. When you had to raise your sword against Lonato.”

“Lord Lonato hadn’t been the same since Christophe died,” Ashe murmurs.

At a time like this, all he can do is keep his hands busy. The string is a familiar comrade, the pressure of it wound tight against his callused fingertips, as he hooks it in the bottom nock of his bow and tugs it into place. Ashe does not say to Yuri that Gwendal was a good man, or that he died a noble death, protecting his liege lord to the very end. He does not say that Gwendal cared very much for Yuri. All of that is true, and if Yuri does not know it already in his heart, there is no point in Ashe saying it out loud.

So Ashe keeps their silence for now, only lets Yuri sigh, sheathe his sword and look down at the burned ground beneath their feet. Above them, the sky is a savage red, a sunset that will be coming for them soon if they don’t keep moving. They have to keep moving.

“You did what I couldn’t, Yuri. You dealt the final blow yourself,” says Ashe quietly, after a while. “I know you did your best.”

Yuri smiles. Even in the midst of all this death, to see that smile makes something in Ashe’s chest unclench. “Oh, Ashe. To have your faith. But I have to say, even if I don’t have any faith in myself at times, just the fact that you do gives me a bit of courage. Thank you.”

Ashe picks up his bow. _I didn’t do anything._ He might have said that, five years ago. They are all doing something now, tooth and nail, they are all doing everything they can to forge a just world. Somewhere along the way, Ashe’s dream became so much bigger than being a knight. He can only hope that Yuri will still be by his side in that world, when they get there.

* * *

That night, Yuri comes to Ashe’s tent. They have marched two hours relentlessly south of Ailell, and the Oghma Mountains will be visible on the horizon in the morning. They are far from the fires now, and yet Yuri’s gaze is still full of cinders.

“Shhh,” Yuri murmurs, as he pushes the tent flap open and enters. “Don’t say anything. You don’t have to say anything. I just… I just want to sit with you.”

Ashe nods. He doesn’t say anything.

Yuri comes to his side, takes a deep breath, opens his mouth and begins to sing. This is no song from the opera. It is a song from the streets, a folk song older than Faerghus itself. In Yuri’s tender voice, it becomes a lament, a threnody for the fallen, but also a song of hope, a song of love.

Tears prick at Ashe’s eyes. He does not blink them away. He pulls the blankets close around them and takes Yuri’s hand. It is such a gentle thing, resting in his own. He wishes the rest of the world saw the Yuri he did, the one whose heart is always bleeding just a little bit. But for now, this is how the moonlight finds them later when the clouds have cleared, Yuri’s head on Ashe’s shoulder, their sleep no longer fitful, at least for the next few hours.

* * *

This is how Ashe remembers it.

It was Christophe’s birthday and Count Rowe had brought his new adopted son along, a lithe little being made of bravery and violets. The very first time Ashe laid eyes on Yuri, he was breaking up a fight between two younger kids with all the assurance of someone who knows they will listen to him, and then he started playing hide and seek with them around the pillars and the pottery. Ashe kept looking over, wishing he could join. What a kind boy he must be, that the children loved him immediately. How his laugh made everything around him brighter.

Later, when he saw Yuri finally standing alone by the curtains with that goblet in his hand, Ashe went to him and said, let me show you the library, because he wanted to show Yuri his favourite place in the whole of Castle Gaspard. They sat at the foot of the ladder reading Ashe’s favourite book until the servants came looking for them, told Ashe Lord Lonato was quite beside himself with worry and he needed to come down to dinner right away, and it was Yuri who stood up and bowed and said it was his fault, he begged forgiveness for distracting his host so.

Yuri says he remembers nothing of this. They are in Derdriu and Dimitri has just handed Failnaught to Ashe. Said: it is his to use for now, until the day comes to return it to Claude. Ashe is holding it up with mute reverence, tilting it to catch the candelight from every angle, until Yuri reaches to lower his hand and tells Ashe he will take an eye out swinging that great big Relic around like that.

Perhaps, thinks Ashe, it does not matter so much what they remember, and do not. They have come apart and back together so many times over the years; they have learned each other over and over anew. By the time the war is over, every kiss will feel like the first one, and the last, and both at the same time.

* * *

On the afternoon of Dimitri’s coronation day, Ashe finds Yuri in the courtyard.

“You left so quickly.”

Yuri, half-caught in sunlight under the shade of a sprawling oak, turns and smiles. “Figured you’d find me.”

He’s already changed out of his finery, or what passes for it, in all their war-ravaged wardrobes. Like Fhirdiad itself, they are making the best of what little they have. They are mending, as best as they can. Yuri’s in his travel cloak, a little worse for wear and tattered at the edges, but Bernadetta’s patched it up for him so many times Ashe knows Yuri will never part with it.

Ashe goes up to him. He brushes stray remnants of blue and gold confetti off Yuri’s cloak, then tugs at his own collar, feeling warm and overdressed. “Will you go back to Abyss?”

Yuri nods. “For a while. My people there need me. But now that the professor’s in charge at Garreg Mach, I think they’ll be fine. Then, well…”

He pauses, lets everything unspoken fill the space between them. Ashe’s throat is full of promises he does not know if he can make. He does not know the first thing about being a Lord, or running a castle, let alone an entire territory. He does not know what Yuri will find here, when he returns. If there will be peace, if there will be prosperity, if Ashe will have made a complete mess of House Gaspard. The future is bigger than he can start to imagine. There is only one truth he can offer, at this point, but it is a hard-won one, and he does not offer it lightly.

“I’ll be here,” he says.

“Ashe—” Yuri starts, then stops. He shakes his head, as if to clear his mind, then looks at Ashe. Under this open sky, his gaze is frank, unguarded in a way that makes Ashe’s heart ache more than he can say. “To be honest, I don’t know if I have it in me. To come out of the dark. What do you see when you look at me?”

Ashe looks, and he looks again, and again. If he could only hold this moment, so alive and warm in his hands, just like this forever. Face to face with Yuri, without a battlefield at their backs and blood at their feet. Birdsong beginning to fill the air again, joyous songs they have not heard since they were children, free from nobility and any of this.

Five years ago, Ashe might have had a different answer for Yuri. A skilled swordsman. A courageous leader. A boy who chose beauty and honour always, no matter what. Someone more than Ashe himself could ever be. He knows these are not answers Yuri wants to hear. There’s still that part of him looking over his shoulder, at the safety of a life in the shadows. Who wants someone to tell him he’s an imposter, a thief, a trickster. The mockingbird who made his home in a nest where he doesn’t belong. Someone not good enough for Ashe.

They are older now, and they both know better. Ashe closes the distance between them, draws himself up to his full height and rests his hand on Yuri’s face.

 _Someone like me._ And out loud, he says, “I know you.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading ♥ this fic owes a great deal of its existence to Eth, whose fic [the light behind your eyes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22935301) really kicked me off this Yuriashe cliff I was already hanging out on, and to Meg, as always.
> 
> your kudos, comments and yells are dearly appreciated. find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/lightveils)!


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